Bill Buxton

Check out Bill Buxton's work, he wrote a lot about this: https://www.billbuxton.com/

Track balls almost always are worse than mice, in terms of speed and accuracy acquiring a target. This is typical: https://www.billbuxton.com/fitts91.html I'm sure there are trackball prodigies that can do great things with them, but for the masses, they're not optimum.

Bill Buxton tangent: http://billbuxton.com/inputManuscript.html is full of great stuff.

It was such an amazing system and it's unbelievable that this was published in 1963. Too bad it took more than 3 decades before it made it into people's homes. Anyone finding this interesting might find Bill Buxton's timeline of devices interesting too: http://www.billbuxton.com/inputTimeline.html

The HCI researcher Bill Buxton has a quite comprehensive run-down titled "Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known and Loved ": http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

You might find the following interesting: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

Some days ago I posted this link: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html These word sum it up for me: "In making this statement about their awareness of past work, I am not criticizing Westerman, the iPhone, or Apple. It is simply good practice and good scholarship to know the literature and do one's homework when embarking on a new product. What I am pointing out, however, is that "new" technologies - like multi-touch - do not grow out of a vacuum. While marketing tends to like the "great invention" story, real innovation rarely works that way. In short, the evolution of multi-touch is a text-book example of what I call "the long-nose of innovation."" The link also provides a nice overview of the history of touch.

Is he showcasing the extent of his expertise via the design of his personal Web site? http://www.billbuxton.com/ It looks to me to be a mock-off of Jakob Nielsen's http://www.useit.com/

Not to take anything away from Jeff Han, because he's done some great work, but most of the techniques he demonstrates in that video were invented by other people. For example, the use of the pinch gesture for resizing was first published almost 20 years ago. Multi-touch interaction research has a long history, but since the techniques are only now coming to consumer devices, Jeff Han and Apple seem to be getting all the credit. See http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html for a thorough review of multi-touch research.

I thought this article was going to be about mouse cursors. The story there is even worse. We've been stuck in a chicken-and-egg situation for a few decades now. There isn't a single mainstream OS that supports having multiple mouse cursors that I know of, and even if it did, not a single program expects it either - most would break. The closest we have is on-line editors that can have multiple users like Google Docs, and that's not single screen. And you may be thinking "yeah but why?" and I wouldn't blame you, but that's just because you're not aware of how how much our current input devices limit us and how they are based on a flawed model of handedness. Yves Guiard proposed a model in 1988 that argues the dominant/recessive model of handedness is wrong: instead, we constantly perform complicated asymmetrical tasks, with one "coarse" reference-frame hand and a fine-tuned "zoomed-in" hand (the latter being considered the dominant one)[0]. Later research has only backed this up (note that the linked paper has over a thousand citations). When keeping this asymmetrical model in mind designing our input, things tend to just "feel" right. I guarantee you that the best two-handed input methods you use all follow this principle: even if not applied consciously, any two-handed interfaces converges to it. Simple case-in-point: remember 3D shooters before WASD + mouse? WASD = reference frame hand, mouse = fine-tuned input hand. Gamers just intuitively discovered this on their…

Hardly "modern", but here's a description of the graphical design of The Sims pie menus [1] that I impemented in 1999 and wrote up in 2001: The classic papers on transparent user interfaces include Toolglass and Magic Lenses: The See-Through Interface (1993) [2], and A Taxonomy of See-Through Tools (1994) [3]. The pie menus in The Sims [4] use a combination of desaturation, darkening, and alpha blending to feather the edges of the menu. Why transparency and the other effects? I didn't want the pie menus to obscure too much of the scene behind them. You can see through the pie menu as the animation continues on in real time behind it. The head of the currently selected person is drawn in the center of the pie menu, and follows the cursor by looking at the currently selected item. I found it necessary to somehow separate the head from the rest of the scene, otherwise it looked like a giant head was floating in a room of the house! Drawing a solid opaque menu background would obscure too much of the scene. But even a partially transparent menu background still did not visually separate the head from the background scene enough. It looked muddy and cluttered, instead of crisp and bright. So instead of simply alpha blending, I actually made it desaturate the background (removes the color so it's gray scale), and darken it (like casting a colorless shadow). I wanted the colorful head to look sharp and bright up against the dark gray background. So the effect looks at the Z…

More about Bill Buxton: http://www.billbuxton.com/

You know of many people coming up with ideas like pinch-to-zoom and just throwing them away? As a matter of fact, I do. Let me present to you a very popular example, pinch to zoom: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html I'm sure you are confused, because Apple has a patent on this because they invented it, right? Not quite. Apple has a very narrow patent on it for using it in conjunction with a particular technology. To most people, applying pinch to zoom on a capacitive screen verses some other type of screen is pretty obvious, it works in any situation where you have multiple touch points. None of this stopped Apple from patenting it. It didn't stop the patent system from granting the patent. And perhaps worst of all, it doesn't stop Apple from using this patent to claim that they did all sorts of work and pioneered multitouch with gestures like pinch to zoom. The problem many of have with Apple stems from exactly this type of situation. While this is one of the most talked about, I have no doubt that you can find many other examples of Apple enforcing trivial patents granted in a narrow band, or in some caes like the Apple vs Samsung, not so narrow. You don't typically see people complaining about patents on Latent Semantic Indexing, Page Rank, or other complex algorithms that are truly non-obvious. If our society truly believes that minor tweaks on existing ideas are grand innovations worthy of patent protection, that's a very sad statement on the human…

Marking Menus [1], Pie Menus, Radial Menus and friends have been around for a while. There is good body of research on them, with some recent research done on their use in multi-touch environments. [2] While working at DreamWorks, I would often watch artists navigate complex marking menu hierarchies and invoke a command before the menu items themselves could actually be read by a non-trained user. In our custom lighting tool, you could execute the marking menu command by invoking the menu command and making them mouse movement before the menu actually drew. 1. https://www.billbuxton.com/MMUserLearn.html 2. https://damassets.autodesk.net/content/dam/autodesk/research/publicati…

It sounds a lot like “auditory icons” as used in Emacspeak [0] and some other environments to improve accessibility for people with vision impairments. Bill Buxton [1] seems to have a good treatment of the subject but i don’t know what’s autoritative [0] https://tvraman.github.io/emacspeak/manual/Auditory-Icons.html [1] https://www.billbuxton.com/AudioUI06icons.pdf

Bill Buxton is where my head goes for marking/radial/pie menus. https://www.billbuxton.com/MMUserLearn.html

Everything is built from something else. Not doing the fundamental science that leads to a product doesn't mean that the product itself isn't innovative. Apple's interface elements[0] and interactions[1] were no doubt derived from elsewhere too. Getting UI elements on a screen wasn't new. Cramming a capacative touchscreen into a phone was very new. [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/button [1] http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

Engelbart’s keyboard is discussed in this chapter on chorded keyboard boards: http://www.billbuxton.com/input06.ChordKeyboards.pdf

> What person would ever want this "feature"? Look up research on "media spaces" if you're interested in the practical applications of this kind of feature. Just one example paper, but there are many more: https://www.billbuxton.com/DGPmediaspace.pdf Digitally creating a "portal" like this can be considered roughly analogous to connected spaces in real life. So, for example, two break rooms across different campuses of the same company, or a couple in a long-distance relationship that would ordinarily live together if not for whatever was keeping them in LDR mode stand to benefit from this sort of continuous video communication.

I got really excited about chorded keyboards and did some research in the past. The chorded keyboard is not as efficient as two handed QWERTY. Englebart reported getting 35 words per minute with his right hand and 25 WPM on the left after extensive training[1]. Granted, this is a good speed for having one hand free to use another type of input (pen, mouse, touch screen or whatever). A chorded keyboard is also a promising idea for mobile computing where a dedicated physical qwerty keyboard is unwieldy. I wasn't able to see enough of a benefit to try building one or purchasing some of the existing products. At the right price point, I definitely would try it as a novelty. It seems there is a chicken and egg problem of inputs and software that makes you efficient using them. [1] http://www.billbuxton.com/input06.ChordKeyboards.pdf

Previous discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4016421 And for who may interested in the idea behind chording keyboard, Bill Buxton wrote an informative chapter in his book http://billbuxton.com/input06.ChordKeyboards.pdf

Years ago (early 80's) one of my Dad's buddies was a dealer for the Writehander. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/bibuxton/buxtoncollectio… It never really took off, but at the time, it was super cool. Edit: some more links on chord keyboards: http://www.billbuxton.com/input06.ChordKeyboards.pdf http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-14851.html

I received a reply on Twitter from Bill Buxton, who worked at Xerox/PARC and other cool places, pointing me at this chapter out of his book: http://www.billbuxton.com/input06.ChordKeyboards.pdf The section "The NLS System: Engelbart and English" contains the most detailed explanation of Engelbart's chording keyboard that I've found, and the rest of the chapter is an interesting read.

Nice, but more a research vehicle than a PDA. About three times as thick as the later Newton, which wasn't known for its thinness, and does not look battery operated yet (scroll to 8:45 in the video) Also, 1992 was late for touch screens. Plato (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato_computer) had one in 1972, and wasn't even the first (http://billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html) So, like almost everything in technology, once you zoom out enough, things that seemed outliers start to fit in patterns.

If it was so "easy", why wasn't it invented a long time ago? It was (1983): http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

The pinch gesture can be traced back to 1983: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html

Actually I think the submitter blew it, they should have submitted the link on that page: http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html which does a good job of showing why at least some of the patents Apple asserted in this case should not be upheld.

Yeah, so what? If you read HCI papers from the 90s (it's what I do for a job-- I'm a PhD student in HCI), you'll see that a lot of very respected researchers claimed that speech technology is not useful (their claim is well-founded: it is slow, environmental noise is unavoidable, what to say is often not obvious, and there's the Midas problem). But, here we are, with people praising Siri. It's how technology works-- every input modality is useful for some tasks, and at some level of maturity. Dismissing technological potential based purely on past technology is short-sighted. [For examples of how Pen+touch is a good idea see http://billbuxton.com/Pen+TouchUIST.pdf. Add type, and it could be powerful indeed]

Not so much, mostly people keep reinventing the wheel over and over again. Consider, there is vary little that separates handheld Apps from desktop applications. Sure, if you come from the Web side of things it seems new and nifty but they are just stand alone applications. Capacitive sensing touch screens where where new in 1965, but wait it's 2012. http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html People worry about what happens when desktop CPU's have hundreds of cores, but the super computer world is already dealing with hundreds of thousands of cores etc. PS: I think this relates to the hacker mentality. If you find a problem you look for a solution rater than see how other people solved the same problem 30 years ago.

Was Nimish Mehta's Flexible Machine Interface in 1982 while at University of Toronto, as far as I can make out. Here's the reference, and his linkedin page if you want to ask him to check. http://www.billbuxton.com/multitouchOverview.html http://www.linkedin.com/in/nimishm